My First Million - #149 - The Craziness of r/WallStreetBets, an $100k Bet, and Startup Ideas with Mercury Banks Founder

Episode Date: January 29, 2021

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP), Sam Parr (@theSamParr), and Immad Akhund (@immad) discuss: - How Shaan 3x his Twitter following in 2 months - The wild r/WallStreetBets trades and Shaan's $100k bet - Immad brings his ideas: a new CRM, startups catering to the creator economy, and "Clubhouse for business" - The future of Substack and it's competitors - The big potential of white labeling lending platforms Today's episode is brought to you by FOCUSAID. It’s the #1 and first nootropic drink in America that’s sold over 100m cans. For 30% off your first order, go to DrinkFocusAid.com. Check it out! Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I feel like I can rule the world I know I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on a road let's travel never looking back like you're talking about the Riverside thing how they were you know I don't know if they were listening or weren't but I have this fear with any startup product

because I know that I don't know if we're just like we were just morally bankrupt but whatever we would build a new product the main you get the excitement you get it out there but you want to see how are people liking it? How are they using it? Is it working? Is it not working?

One way to do that is to have like some God mode version of your product where you can kind of like see, oh, they, you know, let's say you're doing Slack. Maybe if you were doing Slack, I bet you somebody inside Slack could see, oh, this organization signed up. They created a bunch of channels. Oh, that's interesting. They created a channel for like music room. And so because I know that we did it, I bet that every fucking startup kind of does this where

they look into the customer stuff in order to get feedback, right? Good intention. Yeah, but it's so weird. Do you keep one of those slider things? on your computer? No. Dude, I have a Facebook portal. Like, you know, I've basically given Zuck, you know,

root access to my kitchen. Well, it's funny with Mercury, we see all of this transactional data. Says the guy who owns a bank on the call. I know. But we try to, like, avoid it and, like, have good ethics around it. But, you know, when a big wire comes in, like, you can't not notice it, right? Right.

And, like, we need to make sure, yeah, everything works successfully with it and, like, all compliance checks are done. Like, so. I was talking to someone who was, like, 500 or, 1,000 employee at Stripe. So not early, but kind of early, but late enough

that you would think they would have rules. And he said that any employee could log in and see anyone's transactions. There's been a bunch of things. I remember Uber, there was a story where like people could basically just stock their, you know, ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend, like their whereabouts because it's like, oh, they're requesting a ride here at 9 p.m. Why did they do that? And like, there was a story that broke.

I don't know all the details, but it was like the journalists who were writing kind of like hit pieces on Uber, they were kind of like, we know what you're doing. It was a re-code, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Panda. That's right. There's completely legitimate reasons to do it, right? They need to, like, go debug someone's problem or, like, see if there's, you know, some other issues.

So then, like, having, like, layers of restrictions around that, it is tricky. We had it, I remember for one day, so we built this little video messaging app, like a video walkie-talkie app. So it's kind of like a, not like Snapchat. It's not meant to be super private necessarily, but, like, it wasn't self-destructing or anything like that. But these were video messages from like one friend to another. And the day we launched, I remember like one of the years just had his like debugging terminal open.

And the way his debugging terminal was working was like it would just refresh every three seconds. And like the latest message would just show basically right there. And he just wanted to see like he was just checking is there audio and video being transmitted. But I saw it. And I was like, dude, these are like people's video messages. Like we can't just have this. We can't just be wiretapping, you know, every user of the platform. So I made them delete it.

But for like five minutes, we looked at it. And we were like, oh, that's cool. We had all these users in France using it. And they were like, these children, like in high school in France, we're using our product. And I didn't understand anything that they were saying. But I remember feeling so dirty, so evil in that moment for being able to even see it. Yeah.

In my previous company, we ran like a social network for like mobile gamers. And we had like this DM feature in it. It was a little bit of a cesspool. Like, we looked at it once. We were like, wow, these messages are kind of out of control. I won't tell you what the contents were like. It wasn't always savory stuff, and then we were like, you should never look at this stuff again.

I have a Mercury bank account, and we did a big injection of capital into the account, and I literally wanted to email you being like, hey, you see what's going on over here? The bank account's going up, but I was like, okay, I probably shouldn't assume that they're looking at my bank account. Oh, they are. I was so excited. I wanted to tell you. I was like, who could I share this with? You know, maybe the kind of way.

Yeah, we have enough users now that it's not like I see all of these things coming. We're going to introduce you in a second. So we'll do a quick one, but I want to ask, I need to ask Sean something. Amad started a couple cool companies, sold one for about $45 million. Now has this thing called Mercury. It's a banking startup. We're going to talk about it in a second. He also is a prolific angel investor. But first of all, Sean is like a Twitter guy now apparently. That's like his thing. He's like gone from like 18,000 followers to like 75,000 followers in like 60 days. And now he's like. I broke 80K this morning. Okay, sorry, 18 or 20. You've 4X or something in like 60, 90 days. You are now apparently like a stock god, apparently. You're like the biggest troll ever. You're tweeting it out that like if something gets X likes, you're going to buy a billboard.

What is going on? And what's going on with your trades? So I'm just trying to build by Twitter follow. That's the base of it, right? And I was like, okay, so we talked about this. I don't know if you remember this, but a few months ago, two months ago maybe, there was a little email thread between me, you, and Jack Butcher. and it said, you know, let's do a Twitter race.

Like, let's race to 100K or something like that. And Jack was already at like 80. So he's pretty far ahead. You were at like 40 or 50. And I was like, fall over behind at 20. And I was like, oh, yeah, that's great. Let's do it. We all kind of forgot about it.

We didn't even do anything. But more recently, I got added into a little I message group with five other people. And it's called the 100K club. And it was all of us racing. It was like the same idea. There's a different set of five people. Who was it? Really trying to do it.

So two of them have been guests on the pod. And there's, you know, of them. I won't say everyone's name, but you can kind of tell because we're all like just this last month, go real active on Twitter and really shouting each other out. Really, like, great. It's literally a, it's a pump and dump scheme without the dump, right? We're just trying to pump each other's accounts and help each other. And we're trying to share tactics. Like, oh, dude, I know it's cheesy, but at the end of your thread, just write like, hey, follow me if you like stuff like this. I'm the one who started doing that. Right. You do that. I wasn't doing it, but like, I'm just

giving an example of, we're just sharing tiny little tactics of like, hey, look, after you have one that starts to go viral. This is the ratio you want of likes to impressions and retweets to likes. That tells you it's going to go viral. If it's going to go viral, then start doing this every hour. That's like the best thing of the algorithms. We're all just like testing little ideas. It's mostly for shits and giggles. It's not really like any signs to it. That's the background. So Twitter following, Thanksgiving was at like, I don't know, 23,000 followers. Today, 80,000 followers. I think by Mother's Day, I'll be back at zero because I'll be canceled because I am taking some risks in order to grow the following, right? Because the fastest way to grow is get lucky

or say things that are controversial, say things that are like a little out there. And so I've taken some risks along the way. And I think that there's a 40% chance I just get canceled. Can you do a tweet storm about what happened with GameStop? And isn't that, wasn't that huge? Was that a big driver? That's the one I did yesterday. So two days ago, I tweeted out the GameStop story. I basically said, hey, if you're out of the loop, like, here's the hilarious story of the GameStop thing. and that one tweet alone has brought me 30,000 followers, which is like kind of insane. I've never had a tweet debat.

So, yeah, that one went viral. Okay, and what happened with your trade? So you also tweeted that you're going to put $100,000 into GameStop. That was the first tweet, actually. I screenshoted a trade I had made on E-Trade. I put $100,000 into GameStop. I just said it for buy at market on Open, right? Which is like, you know, just like a total gamble.

And I was like, okay, cool, this is fine. And then I tweeted out this story about like, why I'm doing this, right? like here's what's going on with GameStop. If you're out of the loop, there's this really funny thing where the Redditors have literally bankrupted a multi-billion dollar hedge fund because the hedge fund was betting against GameStop and these Redditors all started betting in favor of games.

They started buying up all the stock and basically capitalizing on the greed of the hedge fund. The hedge fund had shorted more than the supply of the stock that was in existence, right? So that's what they recognized was like, holy shit, these guys have taken such an overextended position. maybe we make them pay for their over-extension. And so I was explaining what was going on,

and I bought, I put the trade in. And, you know, the next morning, I happened to wake up before the market open. I woke up in the middle of the night. And I was checking my Twitter feed, and the tweet had gone viral. And so already I'm, oh, this is crazy. I'm getting 5,000, 10,000 followers really quickly.

And so I thought, okay, I kind of already got a lot of value out of this straight gambling to be buying GameStop right now. So I was like, maybe I don't need to do this $100,000 gamble. So I canceled the trade the morning of that $100,000, currently be, I think, $600 or $700,000 within, you know, 48 hours of that trade. And this is with no leverage, right? Like, if I had levered up, like, the way these guys do on Wall Street bets, it could have been $7 million

if I had actually, like, gone wild like them. But, yeah, I canceled the trade. That's the short story. I'm an idiot. I got 30,000 Twitter followers and $0 out of it. You pissed out, man. And then I did the worst possible thing. I chased the miss, which is like, if you're going to, like, if you're going to

miss, just miss. And I bought Bedbath and Beyond, which is, like, one of the other candidates of, you know, that they're trying to do. So I put $100,000 into that one. And it's okay. It's up like five grand or something, but it didn't do the GameStop thing. I'd never buy stocks. I've said this, but it looked like you were having fun. So I did like 10 grand in AMC and like, I've got enough profit now. I can buy like a sick used motorcycle. I wanted to buy a billboard. So now I've decided from this that A, it's very fun to day trade. And so I'm just going to set aside. It's fun when you, yeah, it's fun today, Sean. No, no, no. But what I'm saying is

I'm okay. Just if I lose the money, I'll lose the money. It's no, problem, right? Like, I used to gamble. I mean, I used to play poker like really seriously. I was a semi-professional poker player, but I stopped gambling for many years, just because business became more fun. But now I got that little rush again, and I remember this familiar rush. This is this old friend is back in town. And so now I'm going to set up a, every day, I'm going to make a single trade. And I think I'm going to let it run for either just 24 hours or 48 hours. And I'm just going to take this $100,000. I'm just going to roll it into a new stock every day or every two days. And, and I think I'm going to let it run for And I'm going to see where I end up at the end of the year.

If it goes to zero, it goes to zero. If it goes up, it goes up. But it is very entertaining to do this. But, and last thing, you also have been going hard on Bitcoin. Are you up or down? If you're down on Bitcoin, you're doing something wrong. Most people who are into Bitcoin are up on Bitcoin for sure. All right.

Just wanted an update. Well, I'm just like, that one's less interesting, I think, because like the drama of the GameStop thing is like you have the internet nerds versus like the Wall Street suits. So that's like already interesting. You know, they actually have the best slogan on all time. It's we'll stay retarded longer than you'll stay solvent. Yeah.

And they have like a very good sense of humor. We were talking about Wall Street bets a few months ago. Ever since you brought it up, Sam, I've been hanging out in there, you know, more than I should, just because I find them to be a very funny community. They're obviously like sort of sick and twisted, but, you know, hey, it's entertainment on Reddit, you know, who am I to judge? Amad, are you, so how many startups have you invested in? I think I'm above 180 now.

Those are definitely high risk. Are you playing in any of this craziness? Are you a degenerate like me? do you just do good investing? I think there's something fundamental going on where like the US is just going way too far in like fiscal like stimulus and it's just like very broad base. Like it's not like needs base. So I think 2021 is going to be crazy asset bubble across stocks and Bitcoin and everything. So like that's like a fundamental thing that I'm willing to bet for. So I did like actually my wife got mad at me because I've moved like most of our cash into like stocks and Bitcoin. Because I just think

2021, like, it's just going to go up. There's just so many trillions going into the market. These bets, like, I think they're, like, kind of fun. I actually also bought Bedbothered me on because I missed the game. I'm like... I'm, like, putting money that I don't mind, like, losing

and it's, like, tiny kind of things. I think the market overall... Welcome to the degenerates club. My thinking is, like, look, I can't lose, right? Whether I win money or I lose money, it's all just content for me. And the content builds the audience. The audience is what makes me money in the end. So like, you know, I learned this from when we had Mr. Beast's manager on

the other day, right? This guy's going and tipping $10,000 at a coffee shop, right? Because he understood pretty quickly that, hey, when I do these stunts, these money stunts, these acts of wildness, it generates a lot of attention. It grows my audience. And so I think that most of us, you know, kind of Silicon Valley are like kind of the more successful you get, the more buttoned up you typically get. I think what you see some people doing, Chimath is doing a ton of this, which Elon does a ton of this, which is when you're supposed to be buttoned up and then you act a little wild, you get this disproportionate reward of attention because that community doesn't get a lot of that, right? If you're 13 years old, you're just watching YouTube stars, you're used to one person just

one-upping the other with ridiculousness after ridiculousness. But if you're like a tech person or you're like, you're an entrepreneur, you're used to people saying the right thing and doing the right things, or at least publicly doing that. There's like a barbellness to being cancelable. Like if you're in the middle, you can be canceled, but if you're completely ridiculous or completely, like, buttoned up, then you can't be canceled. So you could have a name. And anyone whose slogan is what it is, what is their teachers? They have a t-shirt. What's it say, Sean?

I forget their t-shirt, but they had one slogan that says, will remain retarded longer than you'll remain solvent. And then they have another thing. I forget what it is. But anyway, anyone whose mantra is that is on that one side of that barbell. Oh, it's, what is it? As if 4chan got an options account or something like that? Yeah, 4chan had like... Bloomberg terminal.

If 4chan had a Bloomberg terminal. There's a part of me that's like, hey, disclaimer, like don't just do shit. Like, make sure you know what you're doing or like you're working with some amount of money that you can afford to lose. And also, when I'm tweeting shit, I'm just tweeting shit, okay?

That doesn't mean I am like doing these things or recommending you do them. I'm just tweeting shit. I feel like I should put that disclaimer out there. I agree. So, Maude, you have an interesting perspective. You own Mercury or you're the founder of Mercury, so you see a lot of banks,

Mercury basically startups come to you and they use you for banking. So you're able to see what's growing quickly. You're also, like you said, invested in 180 startup. So you clearly have some type of perspective. What are you looking for now? I mean, what interests you at the moment? Yeah, kind of think of like the startup game nowadays and like these two slightly different perspectives.

Like, number one is kind of what Mercury is doing where you see this like industry, which is huge. It's full of these incumbents that like everyone hates. And I mean, the crazy thing to me is there's so many of these industries, It's not just banking where it was very obvious everyone hates their bank. They're not customer friendly. They don't have good products, all of that. But it's the same thing in like a ton of different industries, right?

Like you try to get a mortgage or something. It's the same thing. Like life is full of these like painful consumer and business experiences. So I think that's like a whole class of startups. That's really interesting. And yeah, I'm always investing in something like that. What are some other ones besides banking that come to mind that you've either seen people innovating in or you think somebody should go look at that.

old big, stodgy. Let me jump in real quick. Amad was asked that question, but I do want to answer it really quick. So when you guys bought your houses, Sean, were you a W-2 employee? Amad, were you a W-2 employee? Yeah. Okay. My wife was not, for example, and I think you were not, right? Technically a W-2 employee, but if you own more than 25% of a company, they want to see your business financials for like the trailing three years. Yeah. And I didn't like that. I thought that was weird. I'm like, why does that matter? When an employee gets a mortgage, they call their, their boss or HR, which had a small company, it's me. So I answer and I say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, Mallory works here.

She makes this much money. We're not going out of business. She's probably safe. They get mortgages. Me personally, because I own more than 25% of a business, I couldn't get a mortgage. And if I, in the mortgage that they did allow me to get, it was like four and a half percent versus the 2.9 that my wife got. Is that crazy?

Yeah. I mean, all of these institutions around banking, lending, etc., are like, you know, they're freaking like 50, 100-year-old institutions, and they're not, they're as conservative as they get, like they don't change quickly. But that's why fintech exists, right? Like, we're kind of attacking these institutions from, like, all these vectors.

But- Brex did the same thing, right? Brex was basically like, oh, you just raised a $10 million venture round and you can't go open a credit card because of stupid reasons for, like, all the traditional ones. If you have raised money, like, we will get you a credit card, you know, tomorrow.

We understand what credibility means in the startup world, whereas these banks say, show us your history and show us your revenue, show us something. And you're like, well, we're just two guys with, you know, some code. Like, that's not necessarily what they were used to looking for. So Brex did it over there. Mercury is doing it in the banking space. What else you got? I always have these ideas that I'm like, oh, I wish someone did this kind of thing.

And something that I would love for someone to do and I have lots of ways of doing it is a sales force competitor that was actually good. Every time I say this, like lots of people like, it's not possible. Salesforce is so like entrenched and all this stuff, which is, you know, quite similar to things that people were saying to me when I started Mercury in 2017. But I think everyone hates using Salesforce, right? Like, I think that's like, there's a strong entry point there. And I just don't care what people say about it.

So we use Salesforce. I thought that our guys liked it. Do you like it? I don't even use it. I'm not a salesperson. But, I mean, I log in. I mean, it's just like pretty robust. It's relatively customizable.

But isn't there like pipe drive? I'm with, I'm with Ahmaud. I've used it and it's pretty painful to use. There's a few, but none of them have done it. Like, none of them have threatened Salesforce, right? And I think HubSpot is a marketing tool. I don't think the CRM is like their main cell. So this is how I've got like two or three methods of doing the sales force thing. I think one that I quite like nowadays, I've been thinking about this idea for like four or five years.

I've built my own CRM at my previous company, so I'm pretty opinion of. But any, one idea is to do an API first Salesforce. So the problem right now is like, and we see it at Mercury, I think most companies see it is your customer data is just all over the place. You've got some in your database. You've got some in like this analytic software. You've got some in the marketing tool. You've got someone's Stripe. In theory, you can plug that all into Salesforce, but it's not like API first.

It's not like very easy. I mean, even to get an API license to it, you have to pay like way help more. I think all your seats go up to like $200 a month or something like that. But anyway, I think there's an interesting approach to go. go data first and a developer first and make it so you've got basically like really become like the single source of cruise for like customer data. The other ways to go like super snappy, super nice like CRM and none of these like new CRMs. I mean to be fair, I haven't tried all of them and there are like tons of them but none of them are like you know really like the superhuman

of CRMs kind of thing where it's like really customer first and really great. Sam's very skeptical. 90% of people should be skeptical. I'm so skeptical. I'm so skeptical. I also think there's superhuman analogy is kind of dumb because I think, and we had Rahul, the superhuman founder on here, I think he's an awesome guy. I think it's going to be huge. I think superhuman's not that cool. I don't think it's that good. I also have a horrible reaction whenever people, particularly startup people, which all three of us are that. Dude, they call it like a design first and they want it to be slick, but it fucking sucks. Like, you know what's not slick is Amazon? Amazon's not slick and it's awesome. Craigslist isn't slick and it's awesome. I challenge your, and you didn't say slick, but I

challenge that opinion if that's what I think you mean. Yeah, these markets are like so huge that it doesn't matter if even if 90% of people don't want slick, if the other 10% of people are willing to make a decision based on slick, it does like, that's like probably a multibillion dollar. Do you like copper? They advertise all over the place. Is it not called copper? Am I wrong guys?

Cooper. What is it do? It's like a Salesforce competitor and it's very designed first. One of the interesting angles to do the Salesforce or whatever. It could be the banking thing, right? It's like what you guys did, what Brex did, is you go to a customer segment that is small but growing and is completely neglected or misunderstood by the incumbents. And it's really not even worth their time to make it a big priority to go understand this segment.

We see this happening with the creator economy. People are building all the financial tools for the creator economy because they're like, hey, if you're a YouTuber, how do you get a mortgage, right? If you're a Twitch streamer, how do you get a credit card? If you're Clearbank did this with e-commerce. They're like, hey, if you're an e-commerce store, that's only got seven months of data, but every single month,

you're putting in a dollar into Facebook ads and getting out free, well, we'll lend you money. We can just look at your Facebook track record and no bank could ever lend you money based on your Facebook ads manager, but ClearBank was like, no, we understand your business and therefore we'll lend against what we understand. And so I think you have to go to like one of these groups

that is misunderstood and underserved by the traditional infrastructure, whether that's young people, international people, It's a new job category like creators. It's a new company category. It's crypto companies. I think that that's the entry point you kind of want because especially if that market's growing, right? If there's all of a sudden you look up and there's a million creators earning over $50,000

a year, which I believe that there already is, then you're actually in a big market that just looked like a small market when you started or from the outside. Yeah. I mean, that's why a lot of ideas right now are like these remote work ideas. It's been happening for a while, these nomads and like all of this kind of movement. but since the pandemic, I think it's not most, but a ton of people that can be remote will be remote. And like, yeah, tons of interesting things can come from that.

Like, maybe we're going to have, like, cities in the middle of freaking nowhere that are going to become, like, these kind of nomad cities that people really enjoy having, like, tons of nature. And, like, that's ridiculously good internet connection there or something like that. And I've seen lots of ideas that are both touching the real world and vibration and online stuff, that some of these are going to be unicorns. And that's, like, that's, like, a big friend. You mentioned before you came on, you said I, you know,

Travis told me before I came on. think of a bunch of ideas. So I thought of a bunch of ideas. Rattle a couple off. And then if one is interesting, give us the kind of quick two-liner on them. And then if we'll dive into whichever one sounds cool. So the CRM was one I've thought about for a while.

Another one that actually, again, was like a second or third best idea that I had instead of Mercury. But there's lots of like ways to do it. It's kind of like I like someone's phrasing for this as like a clubhouse for business. So it doesn't make sense in like a tiny three or four person company. But how do, once your company is.

get bigger, like, how do you create, like, this serendipity where, like, people can have conversations. It's not, like, you know, meetings are, like, boring and they're annoying to set up. Like, how do we create, like, this kind of interaction, water cooler moment for officers? And I've seen a few versions of this. Nothing is, like, quite hidden for me. I'm actually an investor in Sidekick, which is, which I think is, like, super interesting and it's very close to my vision of it, which they basically give you, like, a tablet that sits next to you. and then your colleagues also potentially have that tablet

and you can like, there's various settings, but you can do a happy hour and all this stuff and it's almost like you're sitting next to someone kind of thing. And I've seen like some online versions of that as well. So I think there's something that, like I really think if the future is going to be remote, we need to solve this problem of making a human connection with like colleagues. And I don't feel like that's unsolvable.

I think like the combination of the right software and hardware can do it. So I don't know what the form factor is yet. And that's the interesting thing about these kind of social behaviors. just like little things can turn it from like a bad idea to a good idea. So it's very hard to like come up with it. But people are doing thousands of experiments. So I think someone will come up with the right factor. Keep rattling off a few.

I just like hearing what you, what you think about. I think there's something like cool happening with substack right now. I'm an invest in substack. But like I feel like there is, I guess like it goes back to your creator point. But there's going to be a whole economy of people that are like journalists basically and they have a direct audience.

and I think substack is like one part of that but I think there's other tools to be built around that I would love to pounce on that Sean you want to talk about this I like this one no go for it so substack I think is badass so writing a newsletter as Sean can tell you as I can tell you writing a newsletter consistently

is significantly harder than probably any other medium well maybe not video but it's really hard and what I'm going to be curious about is seeing if these people are willing to do it for two or three years because I think that will be important. But I think what substack has done is really sick. I like seeing subsack completely kick medium's ass. I think that there's a lot of interesting ways to monetize. Do you know what's going on substack right now with the advertising

Amad? So the hustle, I advertise on substack and they don't like it, but they should allow that. So in their mission, if you go on their website, in their mission, they say we will never allow advertising or I don't know the phrasing but it basically says like no ads ever or something like that and the founders were interviewed in an article that I actually participated in and they said like no we don't want it like because people are like hey can you help us monetize with ads and they're like nope we're not going to do that ever and so the hustle we went direct to a couple guys a couple different people and we paid them X amount of dollars I don't even remember but collectively maybe six figures spread out and they monetized their email with advertisements and they actually made

more from us and they did their subscription and in order to monetize an email with advertising, you actually have to hire a full-time sales team. It's so expensive and it's very, very challenging. It's easy once you got it, but it's really hard. Amad, have you thought about monetizing, when you're thinking about monetizing, has that been something you've been thinking about

is advertising in email? We're talking about like from Substack's perspective, right? You are a creator, but yeah. I think Substack has like an interesting kind of line where they, I think they will not facilitate the advertising. I don't think they will make an ad network, at least like they, as you say, they say it on their website. And, you know, from like talking to them, they are very against that for good reasons. I think, you know, one thing you have to always worry about is, I'm not criticizing them.

One thing that you have to worry about when you're doing a company and like, I worry about this with Mercury is like, as you scale, what stops you becoming the incumbent, right? Like, what stops your incentives aligning with like the thing that you were trying to solve? And I think as soon as they go into advertising, the incentives like align to it, like clickbait and like a printout. and lack of privacy and like content that's like kind of churned and all of this kind of stuff, whereas like subscription kind of aligns better to like long form content where like people are really giving you a bit of trust and you have to like keep it over time kind of thing. So I think it makes sense. I mean, I would be very surprised if they do stop people from wanting advertising.

Like there's going to be some forms of like newsletter content that are just not going to monetize very well via subscription, but we'll monetize very well via advertising. I'm like, yeah, one thing that people don't get is like, things. Facebook makes a ton of money per user for a free product. I think they make like $4 per user on average or something per month. That's insane, right? I mean, you're giving away a free product to the whole world and you're making like that much money for users.

So advertising, if you've got the right kind of data and the right kind of audience, is very lucrative. I think it will be lucrative. And actually, this is a good startup idea. Someone is probably going to make like a really nice newsletter for newsletter ad network, right? because substack's not going to do it. I don't think they can stop the graders doing, wanting it. I have two kind of interesting points.

Did you guys see that Twitter bought review? Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. I think if I'm substack, here's worry number one, which is Twitter buys review, which was a substack competitor, essentially. It was an easy way to publish a newsletter and have a paywall for it. It wasn't done as well as Subtack took off. So this becomes very interesting, right?

I was talking earlier about growing my Twitter following. Like, nobody who's in the game right now really wants to have a big Twitter following. That's a top of fun. to get you to own your audience on email, which is something Sam figured out, like, I don't know how many years ago, seven years ago when he started The Hustle,

he was like, and I remember back then being like, dude, you got to be on Snapchat, you got to be on Facebook. And he's like, yeah, we'll like, we'll do that. But like, all I want is my own little pirate ship. He kept calling it. He's like, I want my own pirate ship, where we own email connections with our customers and we don't have to worry about Facebook changing everything.

Look, can you see this? This is how much I care about the pirate show. I said the show, I guess, his inner thigh right now, where he has a giant tattoo of a pirate ship. And he used to say like some cheesy thing, like every subscriber is a tough of wind in our sales or something. But basically, my point is, you know,

anybody who's growing their audience somewhere, they want to own it if they can. And I think if Twitter integrates in the email, like the ability for me to email my followers, that's a fucking game changer. That is a huge, huge win. If I could basically grab subscribers natively without them clicking out to go to some other app,

There's just a button to subscribe, and if I could just auto email them, that would be amazing. The second thing I think is interesting is, did you guys see what's going on with the Everything bundle? Are you familiar with this? The Everything Bundle is a group of guys, Nathan, Bashaw, Dan Shipper. They got together, they were like, look, let's create a media company on top of substack. What they did was they created a bundle where if you subscribe to the bundle, like 20 bucks a month or whatever it is, you get to be a paid subscriber for like seven writers instead of just the one,

right? Because that's the problem is it sounds cool. Like, oh, yeah, I can just charge a $5 a month subscription. But like if all of us do it, now some reader who just wants to like follow all of us has like 10 subscriptions for $5 a month and it gets really expensive. At the same time for us, it's hard to get customers, right? So one cool way to do it is to join a bundle. And like, people have talked about those before, but most of businesses, bundling or unbundling things. And so when everybody gets a personal newsletter, these guys came along are like, screw it, let's bundle together the personal newsletters. And they have like Jerry Colonna and they have like, you know, a bunch of interesting people

who are a part of the bundle. The URL is every dot TO, every dot 2, every dot TO. And so this was like a side project that they were doing. Then they kind of started taking it more seriously. And then yesterday they announced they raised around and now it's like a media company named every, you know, this substack bundle that a few guys were doing like has turned into like a real experiment and like let's see what happens. And it's pretty cool because if you join the bundle, you get paid.

paid for every, like you're an affiliate, basically. So for every subscriber that joins the bundle through you, you earn like the bulk of their subscription. But any reader who's a part of the bundle, so you get more reach because you're sharing audience with the other guys. I think it's pretty interesting what they're doing. I actually think that this model is in some ways like, I think that, you know, people doing something like this can have a pretty good outcome if they focused on bootstrapping this business. Now, they raise money. Is this ever going to be a billion dollar thing, no, in my opinion, but whatever. I think it's a cool thing.

I think it also solves Sam's point a little bit more that it's hard to kind of, you know, make a newsletter interesting every single week for like two years. Whereas maybe you can make it interesting every month for two years or five years. What's interesting is I just looked up the guy Nathan who started every bundle. He actually used to work at Substack and now they're no longer using Substack. So that's kind of interesting. But my issue with this is I actually went to their website. It's awesome.

I'm going to sign up. The content and the product is pretty cool. I'm excited for it. I don't know what the truth is, but it's positioned a little bit like a collective-y type of thing where it's like we're all equal. And any time I see that, I think, oh, well, once you guys get remotely successful, you're going to implode and die. Yeah, like, when I talk to them, I was like, okay, cool. So how much do I have to share with the other people in this bundle? And what if I want to leave this bundle?

Because I get so popular at that, I'm like, look, I am the bundle, right? It's like when Bill Simmons leaves ESPN, it's like, I don't want to be on this roster of journalists. I am the headliner, so why don't I just do my own thing? Or Connor McGregor in the UFC, like this happens. The stars get so big that the top two people will be worth more than the next 200 people in the bundle. And what's going to happen then is going to be very interesting. What else were you thinking about with substack? I'm sorry, we're kind of talking over you.

No, it's all right. You guys more creators than I am. So I think we do. We invite a guest on and then they say half a sentence and then we talk for 30 minutes. And we're like, thanks for coming. That was awesome. We loved hearing ourselves talk. Tell us about yourself.

Shut the fuck up. Okay, so... Let's say change subject into something that I probably know more than you. I think there's a ton of interesting things in fintech. And like, I have started in fintech in 2017 as like a noob where I didn't know anything. Whereas now, like, I'm just seeing so many interesting things.

There's this whole trend called embedded fintech. I don't know if you're familiar with it. But the idea is like, let's say you run like a SaaS platform and you have like all this access to like business data. maybe you're helping with payments and things like that. What if you offered these people on your platform alone? So there's a company that just invested in. I think they're public enough that I can just say this.

It's called Lendflow, but basically that's like the thing they're going after. And there's someone else doing this with like credit cards. I'm also invested in, but I don't think it's public. But I think there's like, there's something interesting here where, you know, you can take a company and like it's built up an audience, it's called all of this data. And what if you can provide like,

fintech products. And that's historically being like very hard to impossible, right? But I think it's getting easier because of these like tools that are stitching it together. And also, you know, banks are more willing to work with fintech companies. And that's enabling this kind out. So I make sure I understand. So it's basically like when Shopify launched Shopify capital, right? It's like they launched a lending platform within their tool branded as themselves. And maybe it's actually even run by others. I don't know what shopify did. But like the idea would be, you give a business that has many customers or users the ability to have financial services as one of their product offerings, as one of their revenue lines.

And is that why people do it? Is it so they can earn that revenue of lending? Or what is the real reason? I mean, revenue is definitely part of it. But the other thing is the stickiness, right? Like, if this platform is not just like something I use as a SaaS tool, but it's something that's like really powering, like the cash bill of my business, Now that's like 10x more sticky.

So I mean, that's one of the fun things about these fintech products. Can you done this down even a little bit more for me? So you're saying that if I am MailChimp. I'll tell you for the hustle. Here's the example for the hustle. You have trends. The subscribers are trends. I think most of them are going on small business or there's a lot of small businesses

that are subscribers to the hustle and subscribers to trend. Today, when they want to go get a loan, they have to go to another third party provider and say, hey, you know, we would like a loan. Now let's say you had some data about these customers, right? You know that they use you in some way where you feel comfortable offering as an additional service. Instead of just giving you an email, instead of just giving you research reports, you can also get a credit line through the hustle, right? We love to support businesses.

That's why we do what we do. Now, you don't want to build a credit line product. So Imod's investing in these companies that will just make it where you just plug it in and now the hustle can offer credit. I think like hustle is not the best example. You want ones where they have like unfair advantage in terms of data. And for example, if it's. like a dentist practice software, right? There are like two or three companies that like just do

freaking dentists, right? Dentists are great people to like lend to. They're great people to like give credit but you're not you're not letting them money so they can buy your service at a. No, no. This is just like I'm setting up a new dental practice. I need to expand it like I need to get whatever. There's lots of these kind of situations that happen. Again like there's an underserved element right. If you're new to any of these businesses, it's almost impossible to get loans from. So Sam, Sam, the thing you're is he's saying there's companies giving the dental software provider a way to give it to the dentist. That's pretty cool. Is this, so it's lemflow.io, seems pretty neat. What's the comparable for this? It's been happening for a while, right? Square has square capital and they use their data as Stripe and Stripe Capital.

So it's just previously being like you need to be a $40 billion company or something or at least a $5 billion company before you even think about it. And all of those companies that have done it are like pure or fintech place in the first place. So they understand. to have to do it. I don't know. What is it comparable? I'll give you an example. There are companies that basically go to games and they say, hey, don't you want your users to chat with each other? But like, you don't have to build chat. We give you chat that you give to your customers, right, as an additional feature in the game or video chat. This is pretty common. There's a bunch of companies that just, they do the Zoom type thing and they just let you put it into your app. So you're building an education app. Cool. Now you can offer video calls.

Or you build your intercom. You offer customer support. Now you can offer video. customer support. Intercom doesn't have to go build the video chat product to do that. They just use one of these other providers. I think it's cool. It's pretty obvious that it's going to at least be mildly successful, right? Yeah. I mean, it's not just interesting in lending. I think the concept of like embedded fintech is going to happen across like almost every financial product. Whether it's like lending or credit card or even like depository, I think for the kinds of businesses we do, like they'll still want something like Mercury, which is like a fairly kind of deep in-depth product, but for like maybe simpler businesses, maybe freelancers, like, you know,

you just want to have, like, somewhere to store your money and, like, have a debit card. There's no reason that can't be embedded in a substack, for example. Like, maybe substack just instead of making a payout to your bank account, they make a payout to a substack account, and you can just, like, spend their money straight away. And, yeah, it has, like, some perks attached to it kind of thing that are, like, very integrated. Twitch right now. Twitch has millions of creators on the platform. We have, I don't know, I can't say the exact number, but tens of thousands of partners who under contract, earn money every month.

And so they could roll out a debit card, for example, or a product like that that would help the creators while being a potentially a small revenue driver as well per channel. Yeah, and they could even maybe give you enough money to do that mortgage from your Twitch revenues, right? I think it can all like tie together potentially inside these platforms. When you invested in these guys, Lenflow, how early were they? What made me invest?

So I've seen a, you know, being in fintech, like I end up seeing, quite a few pitches like this. And this guy just like, I don't want to like steal too much of his story, but he basically like did not raise money and he got this thing to actually work, which is really hard in fintech. Like normally you have to raise a bunch of money

to like build something. And he just like went out there. He just built this like using his own kind of money, like almost bootstrapped it to like reasonable success. Like he was doing like quite significant revenues. Like again, I don't want to like give away too much. But like more like, you know, significant like a significant seed round kind of revenues. It's very hard at fintech as a sense.

said, like, I've done a ton of, like, seed-round companies in fintech. Normally, they're, like, just building the product, right? So I was really impressed that he did that, and he had, like, a very thought-through thesis about why this would work and how it monetize. And he was also not taking, like, I think a lot of the time, lending companies don't work out because they have to use their own money to do the lending. Like, he'd built up, like, a bunch of, like, partners that were doing the actual lending, which makes it, like, much more of a scalable software play versus, like, you know,

But now I have to like worry about defaults and like underwriting and all of this kind of much more complicated stuff. How many engineers and how much time did it take for you to get Mercury to work? So we started in August 2017 and the first alpha user was January 2019. So a year and three months before we had any alpha users and even then it was pretty crappy. I would say when we launched in April 2019, which was basically a year and a half from start, that was when it was good. For most of that time, we had eight people working on it, including me, six engineers, one designer and one kind of product and BD person. You know, it took a long time, partly because we had like an overly ambitious thing that we wanted to like bank startups and be like a complete replacement for your bank account, which meant that, you know, had to do all the things your bank account does. Like we had to do international wires.

I also really wanted to support like foreign founders, like immigrant founders because I'm an immigrant from the UK and I didn't want to like make a bank that wouldn't like support. like people like me. So we had like probably like unusual levels of like requirement. So it took a long time and the other side is doing the bank partnerships. We ended up doing like two bank partnerships. We actually integrated all the way into one bank partner, which thank

God we ended up switching away from because it's BBVA and they just like shut down all of their Challenger banks. So we missed that only just. So that was the two big thing. Why did they do that? Because I got a notice from Aslo that was like, hey, our bank partner decided to

turn us off. And they were just like, that's it. End of the business. It is like stopped. And there was like, there wasn't even, you know, normally they're like, here's what's going to happen to your account. There's nothing. They just put up the memo that was like, unfortunately, BBVA has shut us down. So why did BBVA do that? And do you think others are going to do that? Why did that? No, so there's a, so as low and simple were wholly owned subsidiaries of BBVA US. So these are not like startups that were independent that could like switch you to another partner bank like Mercury could or whatever. They It was a feature of them.

It's just part of like this big thing that was happening. Basically, PNC bought BBVA USA, I think for $20 billion or something, definitely more than $10 billion between $10 and $20. And as part of that, they just didn't want to worry about these kind of digital banks. Like even though they're growing, the reason like all of these transgender banks exist is because banks don't care about deposit customers. Like that's like the fundamental issue in banking where like they think of depositors as like cost center because it costs them a lot of money to like have.

someone walk into a branch, like sign up for a bank and then like worry about all this stuff. Where they make money is lending. So they think of lending as their revenue and deposit is a cost center. So when they look at like as low or simple, like all they see is cost. Like they don't see potential. Like I think the future is like Challenger banks are just going to completely dominate these incumbents. But they don't understand that. And if they did, like we wouldn't be able to win.

So what's the way you guys think about it? If they think about it that way, how do you think about it? I think there's two things that we think differently. number one, how do we get the cost of servicing customers like near zero, right? To me, it's a software problem, right? We're moving bits around. If the product's good enough, there's no reason they should contact us. And there's no reason we can't, like, give a great product without having a massive cost of like servicing.

So that's one aspect. The second aspect is we think about it a little bit more like a freemium thing, right? Like we have thousands of customers that don't really use it too much to have a few thousand in the account. Maybe we don't make some money on it. But we also have like hundreds of customers that have more than. a million dollars in their bank account because we're servicing startups. We make a ton of money on those bigger guys. And if they can subsidize like thousands of the small guys,

you know, that's easy maps. Like you can do the math. It works out. Whereas banks don't think like that. They're trying to monetize like 100% of their customers, which isn't the right mindset. So that's one aspect of that. I think the other thing, which is like something banks are missing is historically,

there's not really been a reason to switch bank accounts, right? They all kind of sucks. Like switching from Bank of America to Chase. There's not big reason. maybe they'll give you some rewards or some small percentage of people will switch. I think the reality is that I think the Challenger banks are like such a better experience that there is, I mean, it's already happening like we're going exponentially, Chime is going exponentially. Eventually that's going to be like all of this like depository base that they thought was like very safe is going to be now sitting in Challenger banks.

And at that point like you've basically got like this long term relationship. You go, you know, all of this data you can lend against. And really like that's the touch point for. business customers, especially, that's a touch point that people touch like every week. So you can build the rest of a bank quite easily from that starting point. It's much harder to go the other way where you're just like a loan provider and you try to build like a long-term relationship. Because loans are like commodity, you know?

At the end of the day, you want to get the cheapest loan. Whereas the bank is like something you use every day. We want to have the best product, I think. We only have a few more minutes, but what else is interesting you at the moment? Give us some of your radical ideas, either in fintech or not because you're, I know you. you're a pretty creative guy. And I know that you also have been in Silicon Valley for a little while now. You have a very good network of interesting people.

Like, I bet if you just look at your friends from 7, 8, when did you move to Silicon Valley? Like eight years ago, 10 years ago, something like that? 15 years ago. 15 years ago. So if you just look over that time scale, I bet you've just seen people like try, fail, try, and now like home run, you know? Talk a little bit about like kind of like what you've seen in that time from like

just your batch of friends. and like where are they thinking? Where are the smart people looking and thinking about what the future looks like? Yeah. I mean, one thing that's interesting is like the longer you go at it, I feel like the harder problems people tackle. And I think something that I'm, yeah,

it's happening for a while now, but, you know, I'm seeing like people raise like $8 million, $10 million on like an idea, which I think is crazy. But it does mean that people can tackle like much more ambitious problems, right? And that's fun, right? Like I think there's a, ton of things that are going to happen in space.

I think space is going to be super interesting. We've got SpaceX kind of like dropping the cost of like getting one kilogram to space to it's like $10. So that's going to open up a bunch of use cases. And I think that's really interesting. I'm invested in momentous space which kind of like moves things

between like different orbits and it's like doing a SPAC right now. So that's going to work out pretty nicely. How big is momentous? Momentous space like in terms of people or after they do the SPAC it's going to be a two point, well, it's not finished yet and the market is crazy. So 2.2 billion or so if it goes off the current price. You're talking about someone starting a company that puts stuff into space.

How does that even start? I mean, is the founder kind of a big shot already and they just go to investors from the get-go? Because like, that's not even remotely bootstrapable. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like, you need, there is a level of like ambition right now where people are willing to give $10 million to people who aren't not revenue. They're not going to make revenue for a while. I'm also an investor. So Momentous space, let's just finish that off. I invested in 2018 and it's like spacking now and raising 200 million. So it's, and I invested at like seat stage, you know, and they've made some revenue, but it's like their goals are way further than like, you know, where they are today. But it's like that level of ambition is like

kind of exciting, right? So I'm also invested in this other company. So I would say like there is like some recycling of talent going on, right? Like there's people who work at SpaceX who want to do something new. worked at Blue Origin that wanted to do something new. I don't think you can be like, and maybe someone will pull it off, but you can't be like a college kid that's like, hey, I have this space idea. I think that's like hard to do.

You need to really learn and deeply understand that space and then you can launch something. So this momentous space guy has like this crazy story where he was in Russia. He was doing a space company there and had to like leave because of like Putin and like he's got

this like crazy story and the depths of experience that he got from that before he started momentous. Yeah, I just think that's so interesting because I see there's a lot of interesting stuff going on like with that, some of these trucking companies, some of the space companies. And it kind of boggles my mind

because with everything that we do, you can just do it with a laptop and one person can make a little bit of a difference. But with that stuff, I mean, it's all in and years and hundreds of millions of dollars until you see results. And I find it to be incredibly bold and fascinating. And it's kind of interesting to see how that actually comes

of fruition. Yeah. I mean, these moonshots are hard to invest in. Like, I haven't done too many of them, like maybe 10, but it takes years. You know, I've been investing since 2016. I mean, the whole spec thing is like changing it a little bit where you can, especially like these moonshot spec. So like there is this appetite and kind of these retail investors to have like access to these relatively ambitious early stage companies. I don't know whether that is a good thing in the long term because, you know, some of these are going to die. So maybe that's good. Like it's like, it's like when every mobile app was just getting bought by Yahoo and you're like, oh, great, this is this window of time where you actually didn't need to be successful in order to get like a pretty

nice exit. And that's what's happening with the SPACs right now. Is this like a lot of it is, oh, cool, this rhymes with Tesla or SpaceX. Great. I will, this, you know, on the off chance, this is just like those, I'm going to go ahead and buy in, right? And then there's like this self-fulfilling prophecy because right now all the SPACs are up, right? The SPACs have crushed it over the last year. So now somebody's like, oh, somebody's specking something. I'm in, baby. I like, specs, you can't lose. When you have this kind of irrational exuberance, like, sometimes good things come from it, right? Like, if we can get a few of these space companies to become, like, to launch, yeah. You know, maybe there'll be a trillion dollar company there somewhere.

And that'll be nice that retail investors get access to, like, these, like, very early stage kind of companies. Like, it's a little unfair that, like, seed investors can see this in the private sector, but, like, retail investors don't see that upside. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. The thing you said about the ambition is 100% correct. I invest in one company that's like a self-driving car, literally building these mini self-driving cars, like one-person vehicle. What you're talking about the guy we met at our meetup? Yeah. And I like the guy. And they've been working so hard. But like my excitement about the company, you know, when I heard about it and heard the vision, it's like when you talk to the founders that

are doing these really hard ambitious business things, you're like, take all my money. Should I just drop what I'm doing? I'm going to come work for you. I'm going to come be your employee because you're this is so inspiring. Like the world. is going to change. I can't wait. When's the demo? Is it next month? And then like six months go by, 12 months go by, 18 months goodbye. And you're like, fuck, this is hard. Just reading his updates, I'm like, fuck, this is hard. And I'm like, this is a terrible investment. Like I invested in some random ass, like, SaaS, HR tool that's like, you know, I don't even want to hear the update because I'm like, I can't stand. I don't want to hear about the space. It's

like a drain on me. But, you know, those are just better businesses. And you know, most of the time, because they're not trying to like make science fiction turn into reality and build a great business at the same time. And I remember when I introduced, I went to like five kind of like much more experienced investors than me. And I was like, hey, I found this stuff to our car company. I think it's really great. Here's this guy's background. It's a crazy story. And they were like, four out of the five were like, yeah, I've been burned so many times by this.

Like I just don't do hard tech anymore. It's just too hard. Right. And like some people are getting rewarded handsomely when it does work. It just feels amazing. you're investing in a company that's like worth talking about, it's worth backing, it's worth believing in, it's worth doing. And then you make a ton of money.

And they're like, I think nine times out of ten, you're like, God, this is so hard. I can't believe I invest in this. One of the reasons I invest is to like broaden my kind of experience, horizons and learn things. You get that more from these like hot tech companies than you do from like a pure software play. But you want to just diversify, right?

Like a lot of, I personally, I'm like, as you can tell by my freaking hundred investments. I'm a big believer in seat stage diversification because like really what you really want as a seed stage investor is a hundred billion dollar company. And I don't care how good you are as a seat stage investor. You can't tell when it's a 10 million dollar company. It's going to be a hundred billion dollar company. But if you can hit one of those, like you can have a thousand investments fail with like 100 billion dollar company and you're going to be like a great. Do you have any that are that you think are going to. On its way. Yeah. You know, my portfolio is mostly from 2016. So it's just early to get that big. I think I'm like super bullish on Airtable. I don't know when it will be a hundred billion

dollar company, but if they keep executing, I think they could be. I'm a fairly bigish seed investor in Rappi, which is like a combination of postmates, Instacart and pharmacy on demand delivery for Latam. And they've grown like incredibly. So maybe they could do it. And I know, who knows? Maybe Substack could do it. Maybe Clubhouse could do it. You just don't know until you kind of have to let them write for like 10 years. So ask me in 10 years. maybe Mercury will be there as well. None of these other investments better, really. Well, we appreciate you doing this.

Sean, is anything else you want to go over? You should plug your stuff. Where can people find you? Check out Mercury. I literally, right before this, actually, I had one minute before the pod was about to start and had to pay a supplier. And literally just like,

it's going to sound like a commercial, but it was so good. I opened up my phone, face ID'd, like, you know, whatever, just like instantly logged into my bank account, hit the pay someone button, paid someone with my left hand, not even my right hand.

And then we did the podcast one minute later. And I was like, the perfect setup for this podcast. And I'm like, that's how banking should work. And then like I've had so many headaches of the last few months with Wells Fargo and other stuff that, you know, thank you for actually building something that's good. There's so, so rare to actually find tools that like, it's like a pleasure to use versus like a pain. Yeah. Thanks for saying that, Sean.

So if you, if anyone has a business, they want a much better bank than whatever they're using. Go to mercury.com. It's all online, easy to sign up. hopefully you can get it done in like 10 minutes. And then we've thought a lot about like all of these experiences, like how do we make payments like three clicks and really smooth? How do we make like, you know, you can get a virtual card in there. You can set up your bookkeeper as a separate user with restrictive permission.

So there's a ton of like small things that suck at banks that entrepreneurs have to deal with every day. And we just spend a lot of time to make those smooth. And then we have like some advanced features, especially for startup. So we have an API that if you want to plug in kind of your bank details or pay someone automatically, you can kind of integrate that. We have a treasury product now where if you raise $5 million and you want to put $4 million of it into money market funds, like fully integrated and easy to use.

So yeah, check that out. And if you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm just M-R-I-M-M-A-D. And, you know, I try to say interesting things about helping kind of entrepreneurs succeed. And I need to get in on this 100,000 Twitter follow the thing that Sean's going. Don't worry, bro.

I don't close the door behind me. When I get there, I open that door and I hold it for anybody else who wants to run in with me. Nice. All right. Thank you. And we'll see everyone next week.